Absurd Wurld

Sunday, 12 November 2017

It is with courage and hopefulness that I set out to write this book. This is not because of my own situation nor because of the situation I regard the world as being in which, in my estimation, is perilous on both counts and largely ignored for fear of perhaps having to do something about them. No, this courage and hopefulness come from the task I have set myself which is no less than to think about this world of our existence ethically, to muse upon figures of ethical interest from its past and to apply ethical thinking to problems of its present. Why might this task encourage “courage and hopefulness” you might wonder? It is, I think, because in performing such a task one realises that we humans can do better, it engenders hope and possibility. Of course, some have remarked that hope is, of all our failings, by far the worst because it keeps us hanging on to a possible but as yet non-existent future when we should let go and deal with the consequential present. This may often be true but this does not make hope any less a human quality and we are all, in the end, human. This perhaps obvious yet, for me, also deeply profound truth, that we are human beings, is something that has fascinated me for many years along with the obvious question it inspires: what does it mean to be human? One answer might be “to be ethical”.

But this is not to predict or prejudge the outcomes of this book of which I, its writer, remain at this point unaware. In thinking about writing this book I have not decided on conclusions I want to arrive at nor, I think, do I know what they will be. Of course, this is not to suggest that I am currently a blank slate onto which will be written my ethical conclusions. Indeed, as I set out I am not even sure that I will come to any ethical conclusions nor that I should want to. We live today in times much more conducive to libertarian strands of thought in which being told what to do by others, much less by others with a presumed authority, is found unwelcome. In this situation one more person telling us what to do will be unlikely to be happily received. Its also true to say that my predisposition is not one of rules and regulations, of precepts and prohibitions, for, having a spiritual sense and background, I long ago learned the wisdom that for something to be true it must come from inside a person rather than being imposed from without. And so I set out with the view that ethics is not fundamentally about rules people should follow but about what kinds of people human beings should want to be.

I chose to divide the book into two unequal parts. The first is to deal with ethics historically through certain individuals or schools of thought. This is not because I hold to any notion of inspired individuals and, in pretty much every case I will make use of, the people more directly referred to are each set in their own social contexts. Diogenes came from a particular time in Greek thought, Jesus was a member of occupied Jewish society before the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Richard Rorty had a socialist and democratic upbringing (in the political not party political sense) and so on. I do not regard any individuals I will refer to as islands nor do I think of people as islands in general which is probably important to recognise as I begin my journey. As to the reasons I have chosen Diogenes, Qoheleth (the writer of the Jewish book of the Tanakh of the same name), Jesus, the schools of Zen and Taoism, Friedrich Nietzsche, the musician, artist and writer John Cage, those we may refer to in a discussion of existentialism and the pragmatist philosopher and public intellectual Richard Rorty, these are threefold. First, they are all people or schools of thought I’ve had a prior interest in and so are not completely unknown to me. Second, they all have an ethical interest, both from the outside looking in and within themselves. Third, there is no third point. Rules are made to be broken.

Having engaged with historical figures and forms of thought I will then address four areas of contemporary cultural concern. These are sex (encompassing sexuality generally and its expression in pornography and sexwork specifically), migration and race (the two, in today’s world, seem very linked), gender (which is separate from sexuality for my purposes here and more to do with identity) and what I’ve termed “politics, utopia and direction” which is to be a discussing of politics but set within the context of what it is nominally for which is to take society as a whole to an imagined better future, if that doesn’t now seem hopelessly naive of me. In turning to discuss contemporary issues I will hope to provide some clarity on the issues involved, including setting out any relevant ethical questions and what is regarded as being ethically at stake in the issues concerned. It is hoped, as I set out to write my book and do the necessary research to enable me to write it, that the historical aspect of my study will lead to me having tools to be able to address the issues concerned in the second part. All of my historical examples do express opinions on how one should live and that is partly why they have been chosen. What that will amount to in the writing is, as yet, excitingly unknown.

One point to note here, as I try to be as self aware and as aware of my environment as possible, is that in contemporary ethical debate one common observation today is that people are very cognisant of who they are speaking to and what they are (and are not). This is to say, not with much favour, that today people often argue the person and not the argument. This is regrettable. However, the truth is that today “identity politics” is a strand of contemporary debate one must take note of. I regard it as concomitant with a very strong partiality that pervades contemporary discourse, one which is not interested in evidence, investigation or debate but merely in supporting a pre-chosen side or party or identity. Whilst this may be understandable, I do not regard it as very helpful or as very fertile ground for useful debate and I am myself, by disposition, not so inclined. One point that I imagine will come out through this book (for I hold it as true from the outset) is that any future ethical world will surely not be a matter of people just like you, whoever “you” happens to be. Thus, the fact that I am a white, male, (almost but not quite entirely) heterosexual, middle-aged Englishman might mean that, for some, these things that I am but cannot change are obstacles because I do not fit into their predetermined idea of what someone worth listening to looks like. All I can say in response is that any ethical insights I might have are made both because and in spite of who I am. And that if the future is thought to be “sticking to your own kind” then perhaps we are worse off than I thought.

Before I finish the prologue it is required that I share a word or two on why this book is called “An Anti-Conventional Ethics”. Here I can only admit that I betray some familiarity with what will be my historical reference points for they all, in their own ways, redefined the current debates of their times. It is a presupposition as I enter this ethical arena that human beings have too often over-complicated, denaturalized and falsified their lives which have, consequently, become ossified artifacts that have lost touch with the world around them, making of human life something false, illusory, artificial and nihilistic. So besides being “anti-conventional”, something which I hope, but cannot certainly predict, will be more naturalized at the end of the book, this is also to be an anti-anthropocentric ethics. You would surely have to be blind, either physically or intellectually, not to recognize that we are not the only things alive on this planet. As I write now I do not hold the view that, of all things, the humans are most special, holy, set apart. I am, at least for now, unashamedly a holist in many ways and so I will be looking for an ethical whole rather than for bits of ethics here and there, much less for the ethics of one isolated species. I hold to the view that no one should be happy whilst other living things are in pain and nor should your existence impinge on another’s… as far as this is possible.

To many religionists the point of religion is some kind of salvation. Religion, in its turn, can take many forms and I have mused before on how certain kinds of atheist or transhumanist seem very religious people to me. But what then is the ethicist, the one who seeks an ethically-infused future? Is this but a transformation of a salvatory scheme into something very of this world, perhaps even an abandoning of heaven in the belief that we can make our world paradise? I must admit that I am now not so naive that I can believe in human salvation anymore… in any sense. We deal with variations of imperfect and perfect isn’t, wasn’t and will never be in view. It is too much for human beings, and might even be immoral, to think of paradise when all around are people who needlessly suffer and die on a daily basis. It is rightly said that we get the world we allow but, in that case, we need to look in the mirror, collectively and individually, of the world we do allow. I began by saying that setting out upon this task had awoken me to the idea that we humans can do better. That is certainly true. But it will only happen if we want to be better people, to treat people in certain ways, to show who we are by being the people we can be and not the ones we settle for. We live in a world of action and its consequences and so, however we act and according to whatever law, there will never be anybody to blame but ourselves.

Monday, 7 August 2017

The above comment is a tweet sent from the account of Dr Richard Dawkins, once a respected scientist and evolutionary biologist but, in more recent times, a self-important defender of rationality against "pretentious obscurantism". "Pretentious" is a word that Dawkins loves but I wonder if he has ever considered the idea that it might apply to him almost with the truthfulness and precision of a dictionary definition? Whatever the truth of this, Dawkins is one of a modern breed of intellectuals today who gets carried away with his own importance and starts to believe that his views on various topics are not only necessary but important contributions. As a study in a certain kind of modern mind he is a textbook case. Before continuing I should probably point out here that, like Dawkins, I am ​not​ a believer in gods.

I take as my subject today just that sparse tweet at the top of the article. It encapsulates, I think, pretty much all that needs to be said about Dr Richard Dawkins. He rushes to judgment (on the basis of his own background beliefs and seemingly without thinking about it) and would rather be thought of as someone without nuance and thoughtful insight who has been exposed to different forms of culture (a philistine) than be called someone who can be fooled through lack of knowledge (gullible).

And it is knowledge (and its regular companion truth) that are the issues here. Dawkins, as his many public utterances amply show, is a man fixated by these things. He venerates them as surely as any religious worshipper has ever venerated their god. Indeed, I'll go out on a limb and say that he venerates them MUCH MORE than many religious worshippers venerate their god. In his Twitter bio Dawkins refers to "the poetry of reality". This is a gloss to make him seem a bit more artistic and touchy-feely than he actually is. For what Dawkins is really interested in is facts. For Dawkins, facts arbitrate all things. There isn't any real space for poetry - of reality or any other kind. Poems aren't about facts. Poems are about interpretations. You can bet that Dawkins doesn't want reality interpreting. He just wants to know what it is in itself. For Dawkins, facts are completely transparent and need no help from interpretations.

So why should Cage’s 4’33” be thought of by a man who likes to present himself as straightforward, rational and concerned with poetry as “pretentious bollocks”? I really do wonder if Dawkins knows what the point of 4’33” was and what the artistic impulse behind it was. I think he must not for, if he did, he might start to realise that maybe he and Cage have more in common than he first imagined. Cage was a man fascinated with “the poetry of reality” too. In fact, so much was he fascinated with this poetry that he tried to reproduce its chaos and randomness in his music. Not only did he admire the poetry of reality, he allowed room for it in his compositions and the performances of his pieces. So why is Dawkins being so churlish and unkind?

Self-importance and pretentiousness certainly play a role here. Dawkins is a man who is happy to go down in a culture war provided he can happily look at his sinking galleon from the captain’s deck and see the prize of truth still firmly lashed on board. Dawkins is a man for whom a plurality of views (such as poems might give) would be an obfuscation. You are not allowed ​your​ truth and ​your​ experience has no power to mediate anything when Dawkins is in town. William James can go to hell with his ideas that people can believe whatever has the power to convince their will. The truth is one and Dawkins is its disciple (and, presumably in his own mind, its possessor too). So you want to create a piece of music (music for Cage was sounds ​and​ silences) which is different every time because it is focusing on the ambience and sounds in the room rather than a piece played from the stage? Pretentious bollocks! How dare you be so innovative! How dare you think outside of my box! Insight should be coming from the stage and you should be playing the music for us, telling us how it is!

In this we see that for Dawkins - in matters of truth as in matters of art - he holds an authoritarian model. This is based on someone at the front (who possesses the knowledge) and they then spread that out to us who are passive recipients of it. In this, Dawkins is not so much a philistine as just one more example of an old way of thinking. Dawkins is a relic and just one more person taking up the cudgels for a reality based in a certain way of thinking, the way that thinks there is one truth and one way things are (his way). Success is in claiming to know this way and having possession of its supposed truth. In this he is exactly the same as pretty much all the religionists he wants to “good-humouredly ridicule”. He is a dog fighting over the bone of knowledge with those he (in truth) despises. He is not unlike them at all. He just has different gods.

For what is it when a man’s deepest fear be that others will think him gullible? How might one fight off the charge of gullibility? Only, it seems to me, by claiming to have the twin weapons of knowledge and truth at your side. But has Dawkins done the philosophical legwork here? Assuming you have the truth and that you know things is something anyone can do. In many cases the world might even let you go on believing it. Indeed, its something everyone always already does. But its being able to show it with some justification that counts. Surely even a gullible philistine like Dawkins can see that saying you have found the best current way of describing how something works or the best current way to describe the human situation with regard to belief in gods ​does not make that the truth in itself​? This latter epithet is but a compliment you pay to your beliefs that you can’t substantiate, perhaps because you think your views are important, right or because you just don’t think about things very much anymore.

Let’s be clear. All of us are at certain points gullible. None of us possess the required amount of perspicuity. Knowledge and truth are items with disputed values and the status they confer on beliefs is even more disputed than that. But only those who worship knowledge and truth fear being thought of as gullible. The world will keep on spinning even though evolutionary biologists feel free to parcel out their ignorant views on the music of world renowned musicians and theoreticians of music. But it does perhaps behoove a man who claims to represent rationality to be a little bit more rational in his views. As it stands, a tweet such as the one Dawkins put out that day just shows him to be what some of his critics would take him to be: a closed-minded agenda seeking targets, a man so trapped in the network of his own beliefs that he sees infidels everywhere people don’t speak in his rationalist vocabulary of knowledge and truth perspicuous to minds like his, a man so committed to a preening self-regard that understanding and appreciating others has given way to a sterile search for, and veneration of, “truth”. Not only is this an exceedingly arrogant belief, it is philistine in its levels of gullibility.

Friday, 10 March 2017

In his book "Empty Words," a collection of his writings from the mid to late 1970s, John Cage has a paper entitled "The Future of Music". It is a fascinating paper to read and, to my 2017 ears, very prescient. Of course, the future of music is not a foreign subject to Cage for, since his first involvement with music in the 1930s, he had always had a far-sighted approach to what would be coming down the musical pipe and where we would be going. It was in 1937, in another writing of his, that he had predicted that music would become electronic and that then music, as we previously knew it, would change forever. He was, of course, utterly correct about that. It is strange to read a paper first delivered in 1974 that is about the future for, of course, I writing this and you reading it are in it. This gives us an angle on Cage's thoughts and pronouncements that he couldn't possibly have had for we know what happened whereas he could only look and imagine. Nevertheless, Cage, as I have already suggested, seems to do remarkably well. Even from 1974.

In "The Future of Music" Cage is suitably modest. Were someone else writing the paper and not he they would have good reason to argue that Cage did his own fair share of heavy lifting to bring in the very future he talks about. When Cage refers to others (for he was surely not alone) who have worked to drag the future into the present he does not mention himself but, of course, he would have every right to do so. Cage was one of a number of those who worked early on with electronics. Before that he had invented the prepared piano, something that survives to this day. He had pioneered the usage of other people's recorded music as something to be reused and altered in performance which later would be called sampling and become the basis for whole branches of electronic music. So Cage was no effete thinker sitting and observing what the future might be like as some academic philosopher of music. He was one of those making it, a practitioner, a doer. And not only did he work to smash the barrier between the acceptabilities of now and those that would be acceptable in the future, sometimes he erased the boundaries of musical acceptability too. Even today, in 2017, a time we would regard as much freer musically, there are those who tut and shake their head at Cage's name. His idea that all sound is music is anathema to them and still an unacceptable outrage.

And yet Cage in 1974 begins his paper thus: "For many years I've noticed that music - as an activity separated from the rest of life - doesn't enter my mind." He goes on to say that "Strictly musical questions are no longer serious questions" for him. There is something going on here and it has nothing to do with music as a discreet subject hacked off from life and treated as something you do in a sectioned off portion of it. Music and life are somehow intertwined here, inseparable. Cage, by this time already about 40 years into his entwinement with music, can look back at how music has changed over several decades. He can see how, when he started, people were still fighting for the idea that noises, then thought different to sounds, were something beyond the musical pail. He mentions Edgard Varese and says he fought with him (against the musical establishment) on the side of noises. He recounts how, in the 1930s, the only notable piece of percussion music was a piece by Varese himself ("Ionisation") but that, already by the 1940s, several hundred had appeared. This strikes me as odd but I genuinely think that many of us know little of how radically music changed between the start of the 20th century and when we came into it towards the latter part of it. We reading this now are the electronic music generation but Cage was one of those that brought it to be. He knew music before electricity whereas we do not. A musical comment of Cage's in the paper makes this point in a way I find vaguely amusing: "Sounds formerly considered out of tune are now called microtones."

So between the 1930s and 1970s Cage sees that music has changed and it was because of musicians being brave enough to step outside of its presumed boundaries and just do something different. This was not always an easy thing to do. Cage himself, for example, was often poor and relied on friends or sponsors to survive. His turn to indeterminate music did not help him in this because it made many a respectable musician (or potential sponsor) turn their back to him and regard him as persona non grata. But Cage was not for turning back and would struggle on with his own wayward, indeterminate thoughts in his head. Music for him, and those like him, was an exploration. Electricity made sounds and combinations of sounds possible that could not happen in the natural world and he was determined to explore them. There was a time this was called "experimental music" and Cage did not like this. But he came to accept that description for it. In "The Future of Music" he notes how the work done in the 40s and 50s presaged a change in the way we perceive both sounds and time and that aspects of both became tolerable that formerly were not. The picture as a whole is one of discovery, of widening boundaries. This, of course, will always scare those who perceive of themselves as protectors of the old or of orthodoxy and Cage, as the prime example, is a composer who divides people straight down the middle with his ideas and approaches. Cage notes that, in 1974, "Anything goes" but he states that, even then, "not everything is attempted."

One interesting distinction Cage makes here, and its one that has come very much into his future and our present, is the idea of music as process. Formerly, Cage reports, the guiding idea was "structure". "Structure," says Cage, "is like a piece of furniture, whereas process is like the weather." He means to suggest that structure is known and can be probed. It is defined and definite. You can look at a table or a chair and see where all the bits go and how they fit together. But with weather this isn't quite so. We can, of course, observe changes in it but we are never quite sure how it fits together or where the beginning and the end of the changes are. There is no sense, at any given moment, just exactly where we are. In structure we would know. We could pinpoint our place exactly on the table. Not so with weather, our symbol for process. Here we are forever in what Cage calls "the nowmoment" but we are never sure how that nowmoment relates to all the other nowmoments that shall be and shall pass away again. This metaphor, applied musically, changes things. This spatial sense seems to change music itself and alter time, a crucial aspect to music, and how you experience it. Imagine not knowing exactly where you are in your musical piece. Imagine being stuck in a moment and then working within that moment to negotiate your way to the next one. A musical structure is an object rigidly defined. But a process is not and neither can process be rigidly defined. Cage notes that "were a limit set to possible musical processes, a process outside that limit would surely be discovered." Process can include objects too but the reverse isn't true at all. If you are thinking this process conception is very much like a view of the world not as discreet objects but as of all nature together as an environment I would very much agree with you.

Cage goes into a discussion of what he calls "closed-mindedness" and "open-mindedness" and this is a very important section of "The Future of Music". He calls the difference between these two "the difference between information about something... and that something itself." He quotes something written by Charles Ives to strengthen this point: "Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels." Cage says that now "The fences have come down and the labels are being removed." That is, if we are open-minded. The closed-minded still take it that men should put up their artificial fences and apply their fabricated labels to the mountains and meadows of music as if they were inviolable elements. For the open-minded, as Cage sees it, they are not. "An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming in one tank" is Cage's musical vision and this is a tank full of all the sounds and noises that are made, and that could be made, and the musics that could be made with them.

It is here that Cage surveys his musical history and gives reasons for why this spirit of musical open-mindedness has come about and they are interesting ones. First, because "many composers" took up battles for new musical expression, casting off old rules in the process. (This is where Cage could have used himself as a prime example but didn't quoting Cowell and Varese amongst others instead.) Second, Cage notes the changing technology which made changes in sound and therefore music inevitable. This is a point I have made in blogs before but regarding a period after Cage had written this paper. Yet Cage is writing about a period in which tape recorders, sound systems, computers and the first properly usable synthesizers were invented. Of course such inventions would change music. Thirdly, Cage notes that even by the 70s there is what he calls "the interpenetration of cultures" happening. In some spheres this is regarded as a bad thing and much political strife has ensued because of it. But, musically conceived, this has opened up cultures to other ways of conceiving things with the result that the whole is changed. It is to recognise that "music" is not how your culture conceives the rules for such a thing to be at all. Cage's final reason for the open-mindedness is that there are now more of us and more ways than ever to get in touch with each other. Cage could not have known in 1974 how this would exponentially increase. Speaking in his time and place writing the paper he was thinking of telephone and aeroplane. Now we can compose together live on electronic devices linked by wifi or over the Internet. We can musically collaborate with people we will never meet in real time. Cage's point is that when we are exposed to others it inevitably changes us. "Open-mindedness" is the inevitable result.

It is here that we begin to intuit again that, for Cage, music and life are not to be separated. There is some sense in which they are an indivisible organism. As life changes, music will change. As in other places Cage will say we should be open to the life, and so the sounds, that we are living, so here the sense is that our changing lives will be changing music and we should not resist this. We should welcome the change and the new experience rather than, scared and timid, clinging on to rules and formulations which give us a false and unnecessary sense of security. Cage's own change in attitude towards music came when he found he could no longer hold on to the orthodox view of music as communication. He found, he reports in an autobiographical statement, that people would sometimes laugh at music he intended to be somber. So for him the communicative model was a failure. Searching around he found within the Buddhist tradition the notion that "Music's ancient purpose (was) to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." In modern atheistic ears this sounds a bit queer yet we need to remember that Buddhists are not theists either and they believe in no god. So this cannot refer to actual divinities. The question then becomes what it could refer to and this is a riddle I think each musician should tackle for themselves. In any case, it is inescapable that one must recognise that Cage's musical appreciation after the mid 1940s is completely linked to his Buddhist education. Thus, I think, it is unarguable that this is why Cage sees music and life so entwined. But we do not need to be Buddhists ourselves to appreciate Cage's insights which can be taken on their own merits. This therapeutic use of music, if that is what it is, is much in evidence today (Cage's future) as ever more people listen to or play their own music as a means to relax, unwind or simply be taken out of the space in which their daily lives are going on.

Cage builds upon his reasons for open-mindedness and talks about "the non-political togetherness of people". In musical context he sees the future as being about the collapsing of distinctions between composers, performers and listeners. This has to be seen against a historic background in which these roles were rigidly defined and, indeed, separated. One strand here is the invention of indeterminate music (again, he examples others such as Feldman and Wolff as opposed to himself) which gives performers instructions about what to do but not necessarily what to play. So performers, those who have not written the music they play, then become part-time composers in playing within the instructions they have been given. The idea here is of "co-operation" which is another name for what is essentially the making of music socially. Again, and secondly, Cage mentions technology in this regard as it blurs the lines between the roles of composer, performer and listener. Cage, anachronistically to our ears, refers to the people of 1974 who could afford to buy a camera and so regard themselves as photographers. Today we have phones with music studios inside them. Should we not similarly regard ourselves as composers and performers? Cage emphasizes the social nature of this and, indeed, today "phone jams" are possible as people with the requisite technology play together to create music cooperatively on the fly. So Cage got this development bang on. A third way this distinction breaks down is, once again, because many diverse peoples have come into contact with each other. Places where these roles were never very distinct in any case have come into contact with those where they were and a reshuffling of the deck has taken place. Places where improvised music is normal have met those where it was not. And this changes, and opens, minds.

I stop my flow here to note something Cage says in passing. It is perhaps not widely known that John Cage was not a fan of recording his music or, indeed, of recorded music at all. He regarded recordings as, in some sense, dead music. He did not listen to much recorded music and was less than enthusiastic about the recording of his own works. Here he notes that "the popularity of recordings is unfortunate". He thinks this is so not only for musical reasons (think about all that is involved in a musical sense in the idea of setting one moment in time as a repeatable phenomenon) but also for social ones. The sense I get, and he may well make this explicit elsewhere, is that for him music is a living thing, a constant "nowmoment" or cornucopia of possible nowmoments. These happen live and cannot be captured or fettled into some perfect, preserved form (god forbid!). If you think that music is all around us and alive because all sound is music then what could be the musical relevance of saving and repeating some of the sounds when an endless supply is always at hand? The captive form cannot compete with the living, unpredictable experience. Here in this case Cage argues that it is not the task of music to be collected together in some recording so that one person may experience it but it is, instead, the task of music to bring the actual people together, blur the roles of composer, performer and listener and bring all the people together instead. Thus, he will mention with favour the jam session and the music circus.

Cage goes on to note that musical changes have accompanied societal changes and, indeed, the world of the 1970s was not the world of the 1930s and 1940s. This societal change has only increased since Cage wrote and so has the music. Cage, like Morton Subotnick, foresaw a time when ordinary citizens, not composers or musical performers, would have music-making possibilities in their own bags and pockets and, indeed, we are now in that time surrounded by more people of more differing backgrounds than ever before and with the possibility to converse and communicate musically with people from pretty much any country of the world. This cooperative, cross border music-making vision is something that chimes well with Cage's political beliefs as one who thought that the best government was the one that didn't govern (because it didn't need to). But there is another point embedded here in this which needs to be teased out. This is that while Cage conceived that "revolution remains our proper concern" he didn't think this was something we should plan or stop what we were doing to initiate. He thought that revolution was properly that thing that we were at all times already within. This is not simply a political point but a thoroughly musical one as well. It is, as he quotes M.C. Richards, "an art of transformation voluntarily undertaken from within". I wonder how many people conceive of their music as that or how many even realise that their music could be transformative? Is it the case that many are happy with their therapeutic twiddling, unaware of the power that lays in their hands? This is not thought of as an explosive, violent phenomenon but as revolution as evolution, the music that changes us and so the world.

You see, for Cage this all fits together as one organic whole. Music is not a discreet subject for him, governed by archaic and artificial man-made rules. Music is not something you set a time period aside for to do. Music is life and life is music. What you do in one, you do in the other. What you do musically reflects and affects who you are personally and, by extension, socially. Cage sees his band of future musicians as ready for a new world and as taking part in bringing it about. This is a very particular vision and it embroils music in things much wider than itself from the point of view of those who don't see things this way. So Cage is in an entirely different word from people, for example, who fetishize machines or regard what you use as important. We would not find him saying how great this equipment or that equipment is. He would not like the idea of electronic musicians being led by the nose by manufacturers who egg on the notion that unless you have this device then your musical life is somehow incomplete. Indeed, Cage expressly says in "The Future of Music" that "Musicians can do without government." Cage almost seems to suggest that the kinds of music you make will reflect the kind of person you are and the kind of society you envisage. He speaks of "the practicality of anarchy" and of "less anarchic kinds of music" that example "less anarchic forms of society". The message here seems to be that what you are and what you value will be shown through your music. Its as transparent as night and day if you have eyes to see. Do you value the authority figure, the "composer and conductor, the king and prime minister"? Is music for you about being dictated to from on high by the intentions of others? Or is it something else? Cage sides with social, non-authoritative, intercultural music, music that displays anarchic tendencies, for this is how he wishes the world to be.

But this should not be regarded as a dumbing down for Cage explicitly praises the virtues of musical hard work in "The Future of Music". There is a section of this paper in which Cage talks about "the demilitarization of language" which he regards as "a serious musical concern". The metaphor comes because language is regarded as syntactical in nature, like a marching military. Cage says that it dawns on him that "we need a society in which communication is not practiced, in which words become nonsense as they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of the primeval environment." But this concern is a matter of work for it will not come easily. As a former member of the military myself I know that such discipline and uniformity is taught for a reason. It is so in an emergency you will just do what is required without thinking. It has literally been drilled into you. But, when musically applied, this is seen negatively by Cage who, as stated, wanted the intimacy of a lover's communication rather than the syntax of a military language. The response is work to make this so and the realisation that it may take Herculean efforts to bring it about. Cage notes that a number of his pieces are very hard to play and recounts how some of his commissions came with the request that they be easy to perform (which disappointed him) and his eyes light up at the players who, having realised what they are being asked to perform will be difficult, relish the opportunity. He praises those, such as David Tudor, who premiered many of Cage's works before he himself took up composing mostly electronic works himself, as one who worked hard to expand and modify his own playing techniques, in his case on the piano. Cage reserves special mention for the field of electronic music in which "there is endless work to be done". Cage gives his own definition of music (which he was often asked for) as "WORK". This, he says, is his conclusion 40 years into his musical career.

Cage closes his paper on the future of music with a story about Thoreau who, it seems, accidentally set fire to some woods in preparing some food. He ran to try and get help to put out the fire but the nearest settlement was too far away and he was too late and a decent area of the woods burned down. Yet Cage reports that Thoreau noticed that the people who finally came to dowse the flames were happy for the opportunity of an adventure (all except those whose property had burned down, that is). After this episode, Thoreau met someone skilled at burning brush and, observing his methods and talking to him, developed new ways for dealing with fires and fighting them successfully. He also listened to the noises fire made as it burned, remarking that you can hear this same sound sometimes in any small fire you might make yourself for domestic purposes. He also remarked that fire is not only to be regarded as a bad thing. Indeed, it is now more than ever widely understood that fire can serve a cleansing function in the environment. It ventilates the forest floor and provides a new start. It acts as a quite natural cleaning agent if left to itself in a world not bound up with fabricated and artificial human concerns.

But what's the musical application here you are wondering? It is that "everybody knows that useful is useful, but nobody knows that useless is useful, too." This is a reference to a saying of Chuang-tzu in a book Cage received as he was writing "The Future of Music" and it seemed relevant to him. It is, as is normal for Cage, a reminder not to cast aside things because they are thought irrelevant to what is regarded as music conceived as a canon of ideas, a discreet subject. It is a reminder that music is all and not just some. I have reported here only a few of the ideas Cage mentions in this paper. The paper itself is overflowing with both them and directions for music to take in the future. Cage was truly prodigious, "a genius inventor" as his former teacher Schoenberg called him. It is from Cage that I get the notion that it is the idea that is the primary currency of music. Professionalism be damned!

I close by quoting Cage and how he himself finishes "The Future of Music". If you "get it" you will perhaps smile. If not, I hope you will think. I hope you will think about what music is, what music means, what music reveals, what music can and can't do. John Cage did all those things and he helped make the future we all now experience as normal and uncontroversial:

"The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists. For art serves no material purpose. It has nothing to do with changing minds and spirits. The minds and spirits of people are changing. Not only in New York, but everywhere. It is time to give a concert of modern music in Africa. The change is not disruptive. It is cheerful.

Tuesday, 14 February 2017

My recently published podcast, Electronic Oddities 38, was different to my usual podcasts in that it set out to demonstrate something. It set out to show how the sound of music changes over time, how new things become possible or in vogue musically which replace the old ones. Of course, in such a relatively short podcast of around two hours maximum it is not possible to give multiple examples or work out a fully comprehensive theory full of explained examples. One can only give a flavour of the idea. However, judging by the responses so far it seems that my basic point, in the rudimentary form I gave it, has been accepted.

The podcast journeys from The Who's 1971 track "Baba O'Riley", which features Pete Townshend's use of the Arp 2600, through various 1970s uses of electric organs and synthesizers from Pink Floyd's "On The Run" to the full 22 minute version of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn", Jean-Michel Jarre's airy analog in Oxygene 4 and David Bowie's krautrock homage, "Warszawa", into the 1980s where synthpop, formerly a sound never yet heard in popular music, took over in a hundred groups here represented by The Human League, Duran Duran, Scritti Politti and The Pet Shop Boys. Towards the end of the decade the influence of Hip Hop culture is hinted at in the tracks "I Need Love" by LL Cool J and "Buffalo Stance" by Neneh Cherry.

But its not just musical styles that are referred to here. Instrumentation here also plays a vital part of the story. This goes right from the first track with Townshend's use of the Arp, into the EMS Synthi used to perform the vital repeating arpeggio from "On The Run", through the specific sets ups of Kraftwerk and Jarre at the time and into the 1980s. The Human League track "Do Or Die" from their smash hit album "Dare" is notable for being the first record from the UK made with the new (at the time) Linndrum from Roger Linn and the producer of that record, the now sadly deceased British producer, Martin Rushent, had only a few days in which to learn how to program and make use of the machine before recording. The record wouldn't sound remotely the same without it. The same can be said of other 80s tracks I used. Duran Duran's "Save A Prayer" uses a Jupiter 8 sound for its opening riff, LL Cool J's whole song is a TR-808 and a Yamaha DX7. Enya's "Orinoco Flow" is the sound of a Roland D50 preset. Put simply, some songs here couldn't have sounded as they did before the things used to make them were invented.

Unfortunately, space precluded my podcast going beyond 1989 at the current time but some have already asked me about continuing the musical story into the 1990s and beyond. The story I had already told was one of a rock instrumentation, the set up of the first few songs I played from The Who, Deep Purple and Pink Floyd, becoming infected with electronics until, in fits and starts, a more purely electronic one becomes possible. It would be inauthentic and wooden to describe this as true across the board but acts like Kraftwerk or Jarre, which were pure electronic setups, led the way for others to follow suit and to consider electronics as their new band. Such people made acts like The Pet Shop Boys possible. The technology of the 1980s, paradigmatically represented by the DX7 and TR-808 of LL Cool J's "I Need Love", made music like his and that of a thousand empty synthpop songs possible. A new way to sound gave birth to a rebirth of the pop song of the 1960s. Back then it had been the sound of three minutes of guitars as songs were based in rock n roll. But in the 1980s this was re-invented with synths as synthpop, a totally different sonic palette.

So if I am saying it was instruments that gave birth and rebirth to new sounding music what happened after the end of my story, after 1989? Well it seems to me that were I to continue telling the story we would move into the digital 90s when numerous new forms of dance music were tried and invented from Rave to Drum N Bass and Jungle. And let's not forget Trip Hop either. Already on the cusp of the 90s there had been a surge in Acid House based on a 1982 invention of Roland's called the TB-303. The sound of this synth, still heard today and either loved or loathed in equal measure, was the new toy to play with and it took a few years for urban beat makers to decide what to do with it. They decided to use it as the centerpiece of a track rather than as its understated bass support. Instruments such as these, which were relatively cheap and accessible not just to professional musicians but also kids in the street, started what would become a democratizing movement in music creation which led directly to the free for all that we see today.

But back to the 90s which I remember as a bit of a digital wasteground. Synthesizer purists today often disdain the 90s as the fashion in synths became for so-called digital romplers, synths with the heart and soul and heft of a warm analog sound removed from them. Often the music of this time can sound fake and cheesy whether that be the wave of New Jack Swing that rolled over us from America or, to my British ears, the urban forms of music which were using digital tools such as the mega-selling Korg M1. Its piano sound would become ubiquitous and annoying throughout the 90s. But there was also a backlash in popular music and a resurgence in guitar bands through the mid 90s as acts like Oasis and Blur rose to fame, the supposed antidote to tracks like the very digital sounding "Rhythm of The Night" by Corona. The problem with digital synths, and this is not just true of the 90s but they are a good example, is that they are too perfect, too accurate, too mathematical. Analog synths contain variation right down at the basic level of the waveform. Digital synths don't. Its a subtle difference but its there. And that changes what you hear.

There is an actor missing from our story so far and this is partly because it was not a feature of music or music-making that I was familiar with. This is the computer. While some had been using rudimentary computers since the 1980s (such as the Commodore 64 or the program Sound Designer, issued in 1984 and which would, in the end, become Pro Tools) many had not. I was one of the ones who had not but as we went into the 21st century everything would change. By the year 2000 Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason software had been invented and issued for the first time. Software synthesizer plugins and DAWs had been developed throughout the 90s and by 2000 we had Reaktor from Native Instruments, first issued in 1996 as Generator, which was an environment for creating your own software instruments and sound processing devices.

Such tools (as well as earlier versions of what would become the Cubase and Logic Pro of today, invented in the late 80s and early 90s respectively) would fundamentally change how music sounded because they moved the focus of writing to a computer sequencer. Whereas before even musicians using synthesizers had still been players making a song according to sound and feel now they began increasingly to make it according to the computer timeline or, a new phenomenon, to simply be computer users who wanted to make music. I can play you a thousand songs from between 2000-2010 that are locked to the grid, as people call it. The influence of softwares like Live, and DAWs in general, not only allowed musical expression but also shaped it as well. They came not as neutral, uninterested parties but with their own inherent philosophies which were inscribed in what they would and would not let you do as well as in how they let you do it. When you have a grid to work to you work to it. You begin to count samples when what you are making your music with is basically just a fancy counting machine. And that's exactly what a computer is.

You might dispute my last claim but I would argue that people, even musicians, are often easily led and so people, even musicians, are much more likely to do the things that are easy to do rather than taking the effort of doing something that takes more imagination or effort or works against the grain of their tools. People are trainable and habitual and they can be molded by their environments. Plus we have to remember that with each new technology it does take some time for these things to mature and so the first uses of these things are unlikely to be the most innovative or the most striking. The first decade of the 21st century, the first proper, fully-fledged software decade, is full of very neat, precise, in the box music that feels somewhat inert, neutered, coiffured and its because now producers work to that grid on the screen. They worry about drawing neat curves in their softwares and how it looks on the screen. This is a fundamental change. Everything lines up and becomes symmetrical. Take a listen to the numerous popular tracks by Timbaland from this period for a perfect definition of this "in the box" electronic sound.

There is another podcast I did in the Electronic Oddities series and it was back in Episode 9. I called it "The Invention of Electronic Dance Music" and it was meant to be similarly educational as my most recent edition of the show was. It aimed to take dance music from the 1980s, the first genuinely made purely with modern electronic devices, but still with an old time player's sensibility and with no computers in sight, and to contrast its SOUND with the dance music we know from today. I challenge anyone to argue that that old stuff is not fuller, fresher, rawer, more alive and with more depth and soul than its modern, computerized counterparts. You can hear it in the beat AND in the sounds. The overall sonic effect is something much more engaging and effective in my ears. The trouble is it gets lost over time. People's ears get used to the new normal. They think things were always like this (or maybe they never knew anything else?). But it wasn't. As these two podcasts of mine show, when you compare and contrast you hear sonic change. To know where you are sonically, you need to know where we've been and where we came from. It puts where you are now in a necessary sonic perspective.

The Roland Jupiter 8, first issued in 1981.

And now we are in 2017. Since about 2010 or 2011 the tools have begun to change again and now electronic music makers have gone in several directions. Software still retains its fans (and DAWs retain their place as the go to recording device). Electronic avant-gardists Autechre, to the chagrin of some, have eschewed all hardware devices in favour of a software environment (Max/MSP) in which they can design unique and individual setups for themselves. They make a music with it that sounds like no other so maybe we can praise their determination and singularity of purpose. They have not been lazy users of software, content to go where it leads by default, but they have used it to further their own unique ideas. On the other hand, we have seen a resurgence of hardware and even of analog devices. Many manufacturers have jumped on this train and a new generation of kids have a multitude of relatively cheap devices to fiddle with. There is also a more expensive version of this based around modular synthesis, a thing which in many ways started the modern period of electronics itself in the mid to late sixties in the pioneering work of Moog and Buchla. Re-imagined in the mid 90s by Dieter Doepfer to a different standard as Eurorack, this form of doing synthesis has come from left field to emerge as a definitive scene within electronic music as a whole. It has led to many modern devices having CV and Gate ports added to their spec. This would never have happened in the 90s!

But there is a further thing to note about today and I leave you with this thought. This is that music is now ubiquitous itself. It is no longer confined to physical products one had to buy, borrow or steal that was made by professional musicians in expensive recording studios. More music is put online in one day than you could probably listen to in your whole life. We are literally drowning in the stuff and much of it is terrible. Much of it is sonic doodling, the effluvia of bored people. Music, aided by the technology which made it possible for anyone to make it by moving their finger across the glass screen of their mobile device on some app, is now everywhere. In many respects it has become worthless. Is it now also pointless too, now that anyone can do it and the most carefully produced piece of music is side by side with thumb jams and sonic afterthought, my latest noodle? Technology made it so anyone could make sounds, join them together and call it creative. But what happened to the ideas? Is music more than sounds?

Saturday, 4 February 2017

It started off, as most things do with me, quite naively. It was then, as is quite proper for the Internet, completely misunderstood and someone chose to be so offended that they left. I had been looking at an article about the Nonlinear Labs C15 which is a software synthesizer designed by the founder of Native Instruments and the creator of Reaktor, Stefan Schmitt, that is essentially built inside its own custom controller. Thus, it has the power and flexibility of a software instrument but wants to beguile the person who can't put away their need for tactile control. It is advertised as being made for people who like playing musical keyboards and now has numerous demos provided by Federico Solazzo on the Nonlinear Labs website. You might be wondering why me looking at an online article about a curious synthesizer caused Internet outrage. It did so because, musing on what I'd seen, I then went to my Facebook group, Electronic Music Philosophy, and wanted to start a discussion and so I proposed, in the manner of a debating contest, that "the most powerful synthesizers available today are software synthesizers". I was referring to their possibilities, flexibility and "bang for the buck" qualities. It unleashed a deluge of commentary (and one person leaving the group).

Nonlinear Labs C15, a software synth in a box.

John Bowen, who was the first official Moog clinician before moving to work with Dave Smith in 1976 (he's responsible for pretty much all the Sequential Circuits presets thereafter) and later worked with Korg (he was product manager for the Wavestation and helped voice the Korg Z1), in the past few years designed and brought to market his own synthesizer called the Solaris. The Solaris, I saw advertised in one video I watched about it, was said to be a hardware synthesizer designed to be like a software one. This about face from the usual claims of synth manufacturers, a territory that is chock full of software designers telling you how much like hardware their digital plugin sounds, was jarring at the time and it stood out from the crowd of those hawking their products. It's what? Its a hardware synth that wants to emphasize how like software it is? I'm pretty sure I remember John Bowen saying this on a video I watched. This claim must surely have set all sorts of alarm bells ringing for some. I have never played a Solaris so I cannot comment on what it is like but I understand that it has some pleased owners. Some, so I read, were a bit baffled by its complexity.

The Solaris, designed by John Bowen

Perhaps the people in charge of Roland heard of the Solaris too. Bowen went through many iterations of the Solaris before he finally produced the one which would be the production version. So maybe somewhere in some dark room at the Roland headquarters in Japan some eagle-eyed soul saw this claim of being a hardware synth but with the functionality and features of a software one and a light bulb clicked on above their head. What Roland did was invent what they call ACB which stands for "analog circuit behavior". This is a fancy term for the modeling of all the componentry of an analog circuit in order to compile a digital recreation of it. This process is the basis of all the Roland Aira devices of the past few years as well as the Boutique recreations of the much more analog Jupiter 8, JX-3P and Juno-106 and the new flagship System 8. These are hardware devices which contain what are essentially soft synths. Indeed, the System 1 and System 8 synths use what are called by Roland "plug out" synths which can also be used as soft synths in a DAW environment. Its an interesting concept and in some contexts I'd have cause to criticize it. But not today.

The Roland System 8, essentially several soft synths in a custom case.

Autechre are a leading avantgarde electronic act beloved by many and with a hardcore fanbase of often tech savvy people. They have evolved to work exclusively with Max/MSP, a software platform which enables them to essentially build whatever devices they need. Thus, they have the flexibility to design a rig that is a custom fit for exactly what they want to do musically. In interviews they claim to have lost interest in hardware synthesizers with throwaway comments such as that they have not even bought a hardware instrument for at least 5 years. In this they are not like their fellow fan favourite of the electronic intelligentsia, Aphex Twin. He has a well known love for all things hardware and software. For Autechre, though, their move into software is simply led by their musical desires. As they have said, what they want to do can only be done if they can build their devices in a custom way from the ground up. Digital software is the only game in town for that. Autechre have said that they could not replicate in hardware the things they can do in software. Its food for thought when they are making music that many would regard as "cutting edge". In distinction to many electronic musicians like them today, you never see any pictures of Autechre posing with the latest hardware super synth or a giant modular rig. Their musical dictates have led them to some outwardly unimpressive code in a box.

The above was just a few examples of developments in instrument design and usage from the present. As I write all three of the instrument types I named are current products and Autechre are going strong having toured and released a 5 part, over 4 hour long album in 2016. So I have been talking about the contemporary electronic music scene here. But, of course, this isn't the whole story. Yet its notable in an electronic music world that is more recently noted in headlines for its "return to analog" or even just to hardware that software platforms are still going strong. And I suspect there is a hidden multitude of software users out there. In 2009 Native Instruments launched their product Maschine, a groove-based software platform that destroyed the old hardware platform of the Akai MPC for a while. Akai have had to painfully reinvent the MPC as a result but now we find it has re-emerged as what is essentially a DAW in a stand alone box. It can be argued that the invention of Maschine was also a factor in Ableton's creation of Push, a pad controller for its Live software. All the power of Live or Maschine is in the box, as the modern parlance has it. The controllers are saps to the human need for a feeling of direct control over the machine. The same can be said for the recent development of so-called MPE controllers such as the Roli Seaboard or the Linnstrument. They are ways for modern players to catch up with the expressive potential of digital synthesis in the box.

Now although you may have been deceived into thinking by the previous five paragraphs that I'm here to big up software synthesis in this blog, you'd be wrong. I take no sides in any hardware/software battle and much less in any analog/digital debate. I think those debates are pretty much pointless just as many people do. I think that electronic music is about sounds and any device that can produce sounds is alright by me. I am platform agnostic. This means that my original thought which presaged the debate that was had was heuristic and exploratory in intent. It was meant to tease out the issues and find out what was at stake. I think that people who make electronic music should think about this because it helps them to define where they want to go and what might be useful in doing that. Fortunately, the electronic music community is full of lots of thoughtful people who do exactly this in both physical and coded domains. There are Facebook groups for designers of hardware and software instruments and seemingly growing communities of electronic music makers who want to try their own hand at creating things custom built by them, for them. This is all to the good.

But within that same community I divine that some lingering prejudices do remain. One, of course, is to value presence over absence, to value tactile physicality. This, I think, is why some come to the defence of hardware over software at any mention of the latter. Immediately, comments appear about the tactile nature of hardware, the fact that a certain user "just doesn't feel right" using a mouse and how its not the same or as much fun. I hear this. But I also note this isn't really a musical criterion. Its an ergonomic one and that doesn't mean its unimportant. It just means its not a musical criterion. Its nothing to do with sound or sonic possibility. Its to do with you as a person. I personally dislike touchscreens and I am profoundly annoyed by the recent moves to push this technology and make synthesis dependent on touching a screen. But if I heard music that had been created by others whilst touching screens it would be irrelevant to me. The touchscreen is not a musical issue in this respect but an ergonomic one for the person who uses a touch device or touch-enabled synthesizer. Some people in my debate mentioned how they disliked DJs on laptops but as a DJ who used a laptop and used CD players before that I can report that over 20 years of active research leads me to the conclusion that such people are the odd ones out because I never recall anyone mentioning it to me at a party or disco. I do recall lots of people laughing, dancing, smiling and generally having a sweaty and enjoyable time. As a listener you just experience sound. If you listen to analyze where it came from and critique it on the fly you're a very strange bird indeed. Especially at a disco.

In the course of the debate that my original comment initiated there were some insightful points and relevant comments. I had never meant to suggest that software synthesizers were the be all and end all. Such a statement would have been as dumb as saying the opposite. When talking about sound any and all sources are in play for they, together, constitute the whole of the possibilities. But we live in a finite world and so this necessitates choices. Some users of modular synthesizers, specifically Eurorack, wanted to argue that their modulars could go head to head with soft synths in the power, flexibility, functions and features stakes and hold their own. This might very well be true if you have a setup of Richard Devine proportions but how much did that cost and how much space is it taking up? There can be no doubt here that in software one can pack in features and functions (and expandability) in no space at all since its simply code. To replicate that physically would require a large wallet and a large space... and it wouldn't then be portable. (Richard Devine's live rig is much smaller than his studio setup.) You can now buy software that emulates Eurorack modular in any case and the only limitation is your CPU. In other places I have criticized a software like Softube Modular but now I find, in this context, that actually you can have modular synthesis but its in your computer and you don't need to worry about power rails blowing or rack rash.. or your wallet so much. Want another LFO? Just click and you've got one.

Softube Modular, which is an emulation of the Eurorack hardware format and some actual Eurorack manufacturers have licensed models of their modules.

So what do synthesists want? Well if the discussion that I started is any guide, and it may or may not be, they want functionality but not at any cost. They also want a certain sound quality... which shouldn't be confused with sound quality as an absolute. Some seem to want a kind of sound as opposed to "the best sound", whatever we decide that might be. (I think thats why people want Minimoogs, for their sound. In terms of mere functionality they are less appealing.) In my discussion some said digital plugins had the best sound possible whereas others said hardware couldn't be beaten for sound. Synthesists also seemed to want "musicality" which sounds very like an amorphous, subjectively-judged quality to me. Those who spoke most about musicality were those trying to make some point against software which, so it seemed, they thought was not as musical as something they could touch.

Some synthesists conceded that, in terms of the most possibility for the least effort, software was clearly the king. There are numerous platforms (Reaktor and Max/MSP being just two) in which you can essentially design entire synth rigs to your own specifications. No hardware setup can match that since you are always stuck to the limitations of the hardware devices as they've been designed by others. But at the same time many noted that the limitations of a physical world are not bad. They are good. It is not necessarily the creative ideal that you have every function and feature at your fingertips for then you will simply achieve overload which is creatively destructive and you become a synth collector rather than a synth user.

Some synthesists, and I have my suspicions that this might actually be a silent majority, wanted the convenience of a format in which you can save things, including the most complex of software patches. And your modular machine from the future can't do that. The same people wanted to live in a land that was not bound by physical limitation in the same way that a person with hardware is. These same synthesists wanted a device which could do additive, spectral, granular, formant and virtual analog synthesis types and have the ability to morph between the types on the fly. We are very much in the software realm here.

In the end synthesists want a lot of different things and they aren't always the same. But this is good since, when it comes to sound, variety is strength and is the factor which makes music as a whole as interesting as it is. The cold, dull world would be the one in which all music was the same.

If you want to read the full unexpurgated discussion that inspires this blog, with comments supporting all sides, you'll need to join Electronic Music Philosophy.

Wednesday, 1 February 2017

Much furore has been generated since an anonymous person in a hoody interrupted a TV interview that white supremacist, Richard Spencer, was giving on the occasion of Trump's inauguration. It was one small punch for a man, one giant punch for Mankind. But since then liberals have debated the rights and wrongs of punching Nazis and those with sympathies for Mr Spencer have accused the left of abrogating the rule of law and of being domestic terrorists advocating violence. They have, from my point of view, done this utterly disingenuously which is the way they usually do anything. But, you might be surprised to learn, I don't berate them for this. This is because there is one thing that those on the right get absolutely correct. They realize they are in a war and they are prepared to do whatever it takes to win it.

One small punch for a man. One giant punch for Mankind.

I have mused on the Nazi punching for very nearly a couple of weeks now. First of all, like many, I find it funny. Who wouldn't land a blow for their beliefs, or against ones they regard as disreputable, if they could? You can be sure that many on the right would love to hurt someone on the left. Some even do. White domestic terrorists of the right wing persuasion are amongst America's most dangerous citizens. But let's be honest enough to say the reverse is true as well. Even whole religions have revenge narratives. The Book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian Bible, is a 22 chapter revenge narrative where all God's enemies are given a proper punching. Many Republicans, I'm sure, love it. But I'm sure many feminists, too, dream of the day that they can ram the patriarchy back down its own throat. These narratives are seen as being about justice but justice is often not much in vogue today. People seeking social justice are referred to as SJWs (social justice warriors) in a very deprecating way.

I look at this whole scene in a very historical way and I think that's the way we should look at it. A lot of people are called Nazis or fascists today. Some suggest Trump is. Others say Bannon definitely is and, certainly, reading quotes accredited to him it seems as if he wants to destroy civil society as we know it. Personally, I think that Trump doesn't really believe much at all. He is not a person of political conviction. He just believes in the aggrandizement of Donald Trump. He wants to build as many golden hotels with TRUMP on the top in 10 foot high letters as possible. He could care less about political ideology. This is not so for all the people on his staff, not least Bannon. The historical angle becomes useful when comparing these people to known and actual Nazis. As in the actual historical Nazis. We just went past the 84th anniversary of Hitler's rise to become Chancellor of Germany. It had taken him almost ten years to get there from his failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich in 1923.

What we see in an historical analysis of Hitler's rise is that he used fear and intimidation to achieve it along with a vigorous politically-motivated narrative. It was, in the parlance of today, very much "Germany First". That is to say that he wrapped his ideology in a flag and this is something a lot of fascists do. But its important to note that this is never what the actual agenda is. Behind the slogan are always lots of ugly truths just waiting to be discovered. Or put into action. Germany First meant death to Jews, people of various frowned upon sexualities and various differing creeds. It meant death or imprisonment for many simply for vocally disagreeing with it. For Germany to be first, it seems, others had to be exterminated. We know that there are those within the Trump administration who are very much more ideologically motivated than Donald Trump and they surely see a slam dunk when all the branches of government are being ruled by the same party at the present time. This is a time to put ideological ideas into action. Trump wants an Attorney General who was too racist to be made a judge and an education secretary who doesn't believe in public education. These are just two examples.

But its not this I'm primarily concerned with here. What I am concerned with is the other side, those who OPPOSE Trump. This side is more interesting because the very relevant question at this time is "What are they going to do about it?" In their rhetoric the Trump administration is Nazi, white supremacist and racist. This is not an exhaustive list. One can easily add corporatist to the list and probably misogynist too. How does one oppose such people? Does one oppose such people by being mealy-mouthed? Maybe one opposes such people by signing petitions? Maybe you oppose them by posting memes or being sarcastic about them or complaining about them in discussions with your friends? Maybe you oppose them by going on marches and holding up banners? Hey, maybe you oppose them by punching them!

But I wonder if the liberals have any balls. I wonder if they have any lines in the sand. I wonder this because, if they don't, I see them living in a right wing fascist state for a long time. Liberals are known for things like tolerance, understanding and freedom. But if you tolerate a white supremacist for too long, understand them and give them freedom then you may find that your fellow citizens of color are given the shitty end of the stick of life - as well as lots of other fringe elements in society too. Toleration, understanding and freedom are not absolute goods. They function only within boundaries. Absolute amounts of any of them become self-refuting. So I wonder where the liberal boundary lines are? But in wondering about the lines I wonder how real the lines are because a line that is not policed and vigorously defended is not a line at all. That means you have to put your neck on the line. Are there liberals prepared to put their neck on the line? There have, historically, been such people. Without the loss of millions of allied lives the world might today be run politically by the axis powers. Without people of color prepared to stand up to injustice and not bow the knee America today might still be racially segregated. If the Union hadn't fought maybe the Confederacy would be in power today. To the extent we have a knowledge of the past we know that political freedoms are not given. They are won and paid for in sacrifice and in blood.

In short, politics is a matter of confrontation. Those who want to conquer love pacifists for they care not for their morals. They only care to win. But do liberals care to win and what will they sacrifice to secure the win? Token gestures here and there are all well and good. We may note the Women's March recently and protest marches in various places about Trump. But that hasn't stopped Trump forging ahead with his plan with new Executive Orders seemingly every day. I foresee a time when some may have to choose between a peaceful family life for themselves or influencing the direction their country goes in. And please be in no doubt: it will take this. Political power is only achieved because no one stops it when someone takes a liberty. Ten people taking action is seen as extremism. Ten million people taking the same action is seen as a popular uprising. Numbers count here. I have long said to myself over many years that if you can put millions of pairs of feet on the street for whatever cause then you will get immediate action. But people have to be prepared to get off their behinds and take that action themselves. It is a strict numbers game. And you may have to count the cost. This is why I say liberals have a choice: peaceful family life or political freedom and justice for all. Be in no doubt: fascists are happy with apathy.

Richard Spencer, I think, deserves a punch. He is not a reasonable man. He is not open to debate to convince him that his white supremacist views are incompatible with more liberal points of view. He is a hate preacher who wants to disadvantage other sections of society based on a belief and based on something those he despises could not change anyway: their skin color. I have said repeatedly over the last ten days that if no one had opposed Hitler with violence (Hitler himself used violence to intimidate his opponents and help him achieve power in the first place) then we might all be talking German today. The analogy holds because Hitler started off as a vocal nobody but, left largely unchecked, his rise led to tens of millions of deaths. Who doesn't think that that should have been opposed vociferously and physically as soon as possible in the light of our historical knowledge today? Any right-minded person would. So if we see people with the same kind of ugly and discriminatory thinking today what should we do?

If you could go back in time would you kill Hitler? What about if you knew what some current person with political power would become? In the end you have to fight for what you believe in or cooperate by your silence in whatever agenda rules the day.

Make your choice but know this: there are no lines in the sand if you aren't prepared to defend them.PS Some may say that violence begets violence and I don't necessarily disagree with that. However, the equation remains the same: where is the line and what are you prepared to do to defend it? Whilst actual, physical opponents exist some measure of response will always be about how much, and in what way, you are prepared to push back. Doing nothing is not a solution.